Off the Razor's Edge
by Lost-In-The-Muse
Summary: Sometimes, the only thing you can do is push through the pain... In which Tony Stark and Nebula pick up the pieces in the aftermath of The Snap.


Ash had a particular taste. Not quite sour and definitely not sweet. It burned.

Burned his tongue, burned his throat, burned his stomach. He wanted to throw it all up, it made him sick just to think about it.

And there was a hole in his chest as if the arc reactor was still there. A bottomless pit forming, growing, expanding as the never abyss began to take hold in his heart. He felt numb. Detached from his body.

Despite all of the nightmares, the constant worrying, the endless hours spent on bubble wrapping the kid in a spider suit, Tony never thought that it would ever end up like this. The whisperings of his mind never even brushed upon the thoughts.

Because he swore that he would die before he'd let anything happen to the kid…

...But Peter was gone. Dead. Lost to the winds of a skeletal planet.

Tony struggled to inhale, his breath shaky and pained. The hole in his chest chiseled away at him, mixing in with the pain from the stab wound in his side.

Peter was gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Never to breathe, never to laugh again.

Tony lifted his hand. His trembling hand. It was black, covered in ash. Peter's ash.

A lump the size of a softball suddenly found itself lodged in Tony's throat. This wasn't happening. It couldn't be happening.

Peter was… Peter wasn't even supposed to be there. He was supposed to have been on that field trip. The one to the MoMA for school. The kid had been talking non-stop about it for a solid week, and not because he was particularly liked art, but because his friend -that MJ girl- was looking forward to it.

It was just the kind of person Peter is- was. Getting excited about something because his friend was excited.

Now Peter was never going to get excited for anything again. Not for field trips to the museum, not for the release of a new Star Wars movie, not for going out and protecting people as Queen's very own Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man…

...The kid should have stayed on the bus. Shouldn't have gotten involved. And Tony was the one who got him involved.

He had so many opportunities to send him home to get Peter to sit this fight out. Told him to get back to his class instead of encouraging him to go after Strange. Been more firm when he realized that Peter had stowed away on the flying donut. Protected him more…

_"If anything, it's kinda your fault."_

The kid's words on the spaceship echoed in Tony's ears.

Maybe if Tony hadn't told him to go after the wizard, maybe if Tony told Peter to turn around immediately when the teenage superhero swung onto the scene, maybe if Tony had eliminated the invading aliens faster, maybe if Tony actually succeeded at protecting the people he cared about…

...maybe maybe maybe, but the facts still stand...

...Peter was gone…

…And it was all Tony's fault.

He rocked himself a little, eyes closed, hand pressed against his face.

It was his fault. It was always his fault.

Tony was vaguely aware of footsteps coming closer. Someone sat down beside him. They said nothing. He said nothing.

A whistling wind blew past him, rustling his hair, disturbing the ground. Tony clenched his ashen fist and held it against his chest, keeping the last of Peter close to his heart.

* * *

He did it.

The realization dawned on Nebula just as quickly and brutally as the realization that her sister was dead. Thanos succeeded. Half of the universe was gone with the snap of his fingers. Just like that.

Her left arm in pain.

She could hear Mantis's warning cry echoing in her head and the near-instantaneous combustion that followed. It took Nebula a moment to process what had happened to the insectoid being. But when Drax started to fade, Nebula knew that there was no hope left for any of them.

Thanos had won.

And it seemed like two planets were added to the enormous weight on her shoulders.

Quill was next. Gamora's insufferable boyfriend, and perhaps the last member of Gamora's family. Nebula felt the loss clutching her cybernetic heart. She had no idea where Groot or Rocket were. If they were even alive by this point. By the time the wielder of the Time Stone had disintegrated, Nebula had lost all sense of reality.

Gamora's family was gone.

...Nebula's family was gone.

She wanted to cry, break down, and sob on the ground. But she couldn't. Her tear ducts were among the first things Thanos had removed.

Another thing her father took. Her ability to physically show her grief.

So now, all she could feel was exhaustion and numbed horror as she stared at the empty spot where the Child once lay. The Child who was also taken by Thanos's massacre.

_"Please, I don't wanna go- I don't wanna go."_

Nebula squeezed her eyes shut. She was no stranger to the death of children. Hearing their terrified screams at the very sight of her. Thanos had killed many children throughout the years.

She had killed many children throughout the years.

Her stomach curled in on itself. An exposed wire in her arm sparked, and a shot of pain ran through her body, echoing the pain in her metallic heart.

That Child had saved her life. Nebula had been disoriented and severely injured when the shockwave erupted from Thanos's gauntlet. And when her father pulled Titan's moon out of orbit, it was the Child who pulled her to safety.

Now he was dead, and Nebula had a debt that she couldn't repay.

They were all dead.

First Gamora.

Then the Guardians.

Then the Doctor.

Then the Child.

Now, all that was left was her. An abomination made of more machinery than flesh.

And Tony Stark, a broken human that has lost everything.

Just like her.

Nebula opened her eyes and wordlessly sat down next to her fellow survivor of Thanos's genocide, the human that had the misfortune of earning Thanos's respect after stopping his Chitauri army. She gazed across the desolate landscape, the blood orange light lapping against her blue skin. Nebula retreated into the farthest reaches of her mind, desperately hoping to lose herself in a sea of bittersweet memories if just to make reality disappear for a brief moment.

* * *

Once upon a time, Tony thought that the worst thing that could ever happen to him was to watch the Avengers die because he wasn't good enough. He remembered that vision. The one he had before he touched the scepter all of those years ago. The one that Wanda Maximoff had given him.

Tony could remember that vision so clearly, of Steve, Bruce, Natasha, Clint, Thor. All of them in space, all of them lying dead at his feet as Leviathans hissed overhead.

And Steve's words.

_You could have saved us. Why didn't you do more?_

It had shaken him so hard he felt as if every fiber of his being had shut down. And that vision had resulted in one of the worst mistakes of his life.

But Tony pulled through. He managed to get through Ultron. He managed to get through seeing the team tear itself apart in what the media had called the 'Civil War.' He managed to get through learning the truth about his parents' deaths. He managed to get through the years that followed.

Even after the team broke apart, even after learning of how Rogers had lied to him for years, Tony still had nightmares about their deaths.

_You could have saved us. Why didn't you do more?_

Tony had that dream, that vision every night after the Ultron diabolical for almost the entire year leading up to the ratification of the Sokovia Accords. He had done everything -everything- to make sure that he would never repeat that same mistake again.

He thought that he'd be alright.

But then Thanos won. Tony's singular life was traded for the lives of half the universe.

Peter turned to ash. Blown away in the ghostly wind of a dead planet.

And Tony realized as he sat huddled on the ground, cradling his soot-covered hand, that reality was worse than any vision could be.

_You could have saved us._

God, it wasn't supposed to turn out like this. Peter… He was supposed to be coming home from that field trip to the art museum, kicking off his shoes as he raced into the kitchen where May would be setting Chinese take out on the table. All of his swirling thoughts on the tip of his tongue, ready to spill out. He never could stay quiet for long.

_You could have saved us._

_I could have-_

"- saved them."

Tony opened his eyes, only slightly, and lifted his head. The blue woman was there, kneeling beside him, staring off into the distance with a broken look on her face. The same one he sees in the mirror all the damn time.

"What?"

The blue woman didn't turn. Didn't move.

"I could have saved them," she whispered again. Quietly. As if she were in a cemetery, and was worried that she would disturb the dead if she spoke any louder. "I had the chance. I was so close to killing Thanos. I almost had him, but…"

She trailed off. She didn't have to finish. Tony understood.

"We can blame ourselves all we want, but that won't change anything." He murmured, not entirely sure if he was talking to her or himself.

The blue woman hummed in response.

They fell silent.

* * *

As a violent storm of grief grew stronger and stronger in her mind, Nebula's body was breaking down wire by wire, circuit by circuit. But she couldn't bring herself to care.

The weight of her mistakes, her failures was crushing her shoulders.

She'd lived with Thanos for years, ever since he destroyed half her planet and kidnapped her to be his own personal assassin. She had so many opportunities to kill him, to stop him before it was too late.

But now there's nothing that she could do. So she sat and stared at the empty patches of ground where her family used to stand.

Nebula couldn't even remember when she stopped referring to the Guardians of the Galaxy as the incompetent morons and started tentatively calling them her family.

It must have started with Gamora when she pulled Nebula close after the battle with Ego and told her that she could stay. Nebula should have stayed. But she left, flying in her ship in solitude as she formulated plan after plan to kill her father. However, that didn't mean that the two sisters didn't stay up for hours talking to each other before they went to sleep.

Mantis reached out to her next. The bug-like woman joined in on a conversation between Nebula and Gamora one day, and the Luphomoid spent hours analyzing the recording of the interaction. Namely, she couldn't figure out why anyone in the galaxy would contact her specifically, just to talk about a fluffy little mouse that they had encountered on their travels.

Then Mantis called again, and again, and again, and soon enough, Nebula started sending Mantis transmissions of her own whenever she saw a cute animal that Mantis might have liked.

Drax always showed up at some point during those interactions. Sometimes Nebula could hear him breathing loudly while Mantis was talking, and other times she could hear him making loud and oblivious observations about whatever it was that caught his attention.

His literal interpretations of anything and everything she said grated on Nebula's nerves, but after a time, she got used to it and even started to enjoy hearing his input. Not that she would ever admit it out loud.

Nebula even came around to Rocket's presence. It was tense between them at first, but the two warmed up to each other to the point where Nebula would ask Rocket if he had any spare parts to fix any part of her that may have been broken. Rocket, in turn, would ask endless questions about her arm.

And Groot always offered her a different piece of candy every time he saw her. Granted, she couldn't always tell what he was saying, and she had a vague suspicion that he was insulting her most of the time. But the gesture was nice all the same.

Finally, there was Quill. Nebula wasn't really too sure what to call her relationship with her sister's boyfriend. More than acquaintances but not quite friends. But Nebula remembered how he called her once for back up on some sort of bounty hunt. And for some strange reason, she agreed. She had been in the area, all of the leads on Thanos's location were dead ends, and she really didn't have anything better to do with her time.

Nebula met up with the Guardians, chatted with Gamora, talked with Mantis and Drax, exchanged a few pleasantries with Rocket and Groot, caught the guy, and cashed in the bounty. She used that money to buy upgrades for her ship, but before she left, Quill installed a stereo system by the controls.

He said something about her needing a little bit of awesomeness in her life.

That music player stayed in her ship. Nebula never got around to getting rid of it.

And now the stereo was destroyed along with her ship, along with her family.

Nebula stared off into the horizon. And suddenly, it hit her.

Maybe… The Guardians weren't all dead. From what Mantis had told her when Nebula contacted her, Rocket and Groot left with an Asgardian to Nidavellir. Perhaps they survived. Perhaps they were still there.

Nebula got up off of the ground and made her way over to the ruins of her ship. She knew what she needed to do.

* * *

Tony watched with weary eyes as the blue woman rummaged through the wreckage of the ship that she had tried to pancake Thanos's face with a few hours earlier.

He should have been concerned, or at least suspicious of what the woman was planning. Tony didn't know her. They had barely spoken a word to each other. And the majority of their interactions revolved around the failure of a fight with Thanos.

The cyborg alien had given him absolutely no reason to trust her, and Tony was very aware of the possibility that she could whip out a weapon and finish him off right then and there. At that moment, it would have been all too easy.

And yet, Tony couldn't bring himself to care.

He just couldn't muster up the energy to do anything more than stare with glazed eyes in her general direction and press his ashen hand even closer to his chest.

Tony felt something touch his shoulder. He blinked and looked up.

"Here," The blue woman said. She held three vials in one hand that cupped them close to her chest while she held two thin bottles in the other hand that she held outstretched towards Tony.

He doesn't take them. Not at first. Instead, Tony glances from the vials to the alien and back to the vials again. He furrowed his eyebrows together like he usually did when trying to figure out a particularly tricky puzzle.

The woman doesn't show any immediate emotion in her body language, but in her mechanical voice quivered for a moment as she said: "For the Child, and the Keeper of the Time Stone."

Tony doesn't respond. Not verbally, at least. There was a tightness in his chest as if that godforsaken car battery was still in his chest.

He reached forward and took the vials.

The blue woman turned on her heels almost immediately and carefully stepped over to where the Guardians of the Galaxy once stood. The ashes of the alien crew were long gone, lost to the whirling and swirling winds along with Peter. But the cyborg bent down anyway and scooped handfuls of dirt into each vial.

Tony stared down at his own vials and then shifted his gaze to his hand.

His breathing grew fast and short. Tiny dots of greys and blacks danced around the corners of his vision. Tears formed at the edges of his eyes before he tilted his head back and blinked them away.

After a few, desperately deep breaths, Tony placed one vial down on the ground beside him, and he began scraping his left hand against the inner edge of the second vial.

He took the utmost care to make sure that every single speck of Peter made it into the glass vial. If he couldn't bring a body home, then at least he was going to get every bit of Peter he could back to Earth.

* * *

"We can't stay here." Tony Stark said, clutching the Child and the Doctor to his chest.

Nebula felt tense over at the unexpected disturbance of the silence. They'd been sitting there without saying a word to each other for a solid hour. Neither of them had the energy to talk while they grieved.

"Your ship looks like it went through a meat grinder, so that's out. Quill must have had a ship, right? I mean, I don't see any other donut around except for the one we crashed."

Nebula turned and stared at the human for a moment before nodding. She rose up off of the ground, not saying a word.

Then she surveyed the area. There was metal debris scattered everywhere. "I don't know where he parked it."

"Guess we better start walking then." Tony Stark muttered. He began pushing himself off of the ground before his arms collapsed out from under him. Nebula snapped her attention to him.

"You are injured." She stated, her mechanical voice echoing against the singed and scared landscape around her.

Nebula watched as Tony Stark eyed the sparkling wires in her robotic arm, "So are you."

She looked down. The damage was bad. Almost bad enough that Nebula wasn't entirely confident that she could fix it. "These are just superficial wounds," she said. After a slight lull in the conversation, she continued. "Are you in danger of dying in the immediate future?"

"Uh, no. I don't think so. I have all of my nanites that weren't destroyed, sealing up the wound. Though it probably won't hold for long." Tony Stark grunted in reply, and then he made a move to try and get back up again.

But before Tony Stark could move any further, Nebula extended her flesh arm out to him. The human stared at it for a moment before he reached up and grabbed her hand. Nebula pulled him up, slung his arm across her shoulders, and wrapped her arm around his waist to keep him steady.

"Thanks," He said, trying to muster up a polite smile but only succeeded in making the corners of his mouth twitch upward for a split second. "You know, once I get my hands on some tools, I can run some repairs on that arm of yours. It looks painful."

Nebula thought about it for a moment and then nodded. That would be helpful.

"Quill's ship should have medical supplies that will work on Terrans. We can use them to tend to your wounds." Nebula said as she began to lead him forward.

Tony Stark winced as he stumbled over a protruding rock. Nebula tightened her grip on him. She ignored the way the pain flared up in her useless metal arm.

"Yeah, that sounds good." he said before looking back at her, "Ok, I do not believe you when you say that the injuries are only superficial. I want to take a look at it once we get to the ship."

"I can manage," Nebula refuted quietly, "You are in a more critical condition right now. We'll fix you first and then me."

The human opened his mouth. Probably to argue, but Nebula cut him off.

"You are too injured to even stand. We fix that first, and then move on from there." She insisted.

Tony Stark didn't respond, and Nebula was fine with that. She could focus on finding the ship better in the silence.

The quiet lasted for a solid minute before Tony Stark spoke again.

"I don't think I caught your name," he said, "and I kind of want to stop referring to you as 'The Blue Woman' in my head."

"Nebula."

"I'm Tony. Tony Stark."

Nebula closed her eyes and exhaled. "I know," she whispered, her words drifting off in the wind.

**Author's Note:**

**Here's a short story I wrote when I was dead inside after watching Endgame earlier this year. I've worked on it in increments, which is why I took so long to finish up, but it's done now. I know that there are lots of fics out there with this same premise but I just had to give it a try with my own little twists. The title of this fic was inspired by the song _Razor's Edge_ by Digital Daggers. It's a really good song and it's worth a listen, (especially the Nightcore version)**

**Have a nice day, folks.**

**~Lost-In-The-Muse**


End file.
